大家好! Wow, I can't believe I only have one week left of MTC. It seems like just yesterday I was starting class for the first time. I am ready to move on though and I'm super excited to go to California. President Durham (San Francisco/Oakland Mission President) had all of the missionaries arriving on Nov 24 get on a Zoom call with him this week. I think there's about 26 new missionaries heading there and for all of them, besides the 9 from my district, it's their original assignment. I learned that our mission has 11 different languages which is so crazy. He also told us that we'd most likely be able to have Mandarin-speaking trainers so I was really excited to hear that. Even though we'll be quarantined for two weeks I'll be able to practice my 中文 so that's awesome.
Last week me and Jackson 长老 taught the other Mandarin speaker for our TRC. He was a lot harder to teach because he spoke a lot more and used more words we didn't know so it was harder to understand what he was saying. We also didn't prepare very well and so we ended up having our worst review yet haha. This kind of came as a shock to us because we'd never really done worse than we thought before, but I know the Lord was humbling us and it ended up being a great experience. This week we focused a lot on teaching to the person's needs and not just the lesson plan. We had gotten into a groove where we would teach pretty similar lessons with each new person so we knew we had to change it up. We prepared with the mindset that we would ask more questions and really get to know what he needed. We also prayed for the spirit to help us understand him and be able to answer his needs. Well, needless to say this week's TRC was soooooo much better. As we focused on his needs we found ourselves ditching our lesson plan and instead focusing on his questions. It was a much better discussion and the spirit helped us know what scriptures to use and things to say. We felt so good about it after we were done and although the review wasn't perfect, it was much improved from our last one.
The thing that I've learned this week is to "teach people, not lessons." It's something I've always heard but not fully understood until these experiences. I'm so grateful for the MTC and the opportunities it provides to develop better teaching skills before you go out for real. I know that through study, prayer, and preparation we are able to access the Spirit which greatly bolsters the power and effectiveness of our lessons. I'm so excited to keep learning and progressing during my last week in the MTC! 我爱你们!
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